Rosa Whiteley: Cultivated Atmospheres

“Cultivated Atmospheres” spans geographies to archive the many ways specific atmospheres are made by food production: from ammonia rains due to intensive pork production; airs filled with fish scales in towns surrounding fishmeal factories; the clouds of methane from intensively farmed animals that encourage rainforest deforestation; or the (atmospheric) carbon calculations fuelling the continued EU farmer protests. Considering how our exhaustive food systems stretch into the skies, the project repositions food politics into the many clouds that emerge from it. By examining the political materiality of the atmosphere, “Cultivated Atmospheres” disassociates from the neoliberal notion of the atmosphere as a void, permitting endless atmospheric trashing. The project aims to consider how we can intervene with and remake atmospheres within ecological and climatic crises, moving beyond the capitalist carbon credit schemes and neoliberal notions of maximum capacities through which we currently view our skies.

Alternative forms of agriculture are already thinking through this transition from within the soil: rebuilding soils and promoting biodiversity. “Cultivated Atmospheres” realigns this active and passionate dedication to agro-soils, to the skies: considering what it means to cultivate an agrobiodiverse cloud. Or, to allow our stomachs to float in the skies. “Cultivated Atmospheres” examines cases of alternative food practices to rethink how we live within and remake our atmospheres – ultimately questioning how care for ecologies through food production may be informed by caring for clouds, and vice versa. Examples include the formation of microclimates through the dew ponds of England; drought gardens within the southern Mediterranean; shelterbelts to reduce wind erosion in crop farming; “clean air” city gardens containing pollutant-absorbing plants; and agro-ecological practices that keep carbon in the soils.

The project explores how the environment, and the food system, can be read in the clouds, and how different cultivation on the ground can be reflected in the clouds above. Clouds may carry omens in a certain color, messages in a certain shape, carry unexpected inhabitants, or deliver much-needed water. Within Athens, the project will consider how wildfires periodically remake the atmosphere of the Balkans Peninsula through a lack of rain-bearing skies, extremely hot airs, and a rise in pyronimbus clouds. The research will investigate what forms of food production and land management already exist, in an effort to create resistant areas to wildfires, working between atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, farming cooperatives, fire management experts, and ecologists, while questioning how food producers may learn to read the skies.